While the remission of your symptoms under protein substitution is of course indicative of protein deficiency as the cause of the problem, it is not very strong evidence, especially given the fact that the initial remission was under an egg rich diet and not protein substitution per se. It is quite possible that another substance in the egg was the active ingredient or that the remission under the egg rich diet was purely incidental. Neither is the absence of hypoproteaemia especially strong evidence that this was not the problem. Unfortunately Medicine is quite a bitch in this regard.
While I am normally not someone to defend the health care system, if your doctors did order the appropriate lab tests and the tests came back negative, I do not think that they had much of a chance to catch your problem. There are just too many alternative explanations including the catchall “stuff we have no way of knowing or finding out with plausible resource allocation” which is probably the most likely hypothesis with problems like yours.
Otherwise your conclusion of “Now, I take what doctors say...” is completely on point and the most important advice you can give to educated people interacting with health care. And I am writing that as a German, so this problem is NOT confined to the US. Btw., in many cases this is not even civilizational inadequacy, but simply owed to the fact that a patient has a lot more info about his personal case and (in cases of a known illness) can easily become a much better expert for his illness that the average doctor who is expected to know something about a whole host of different problems.
To unpack a little why I asked:
While the remission of your symptoms under protein substitution is of course indicative of protein deficiency as the cause of the problem, it is not very strong evidence, especially given the fact that the initial remission was under an egg rich diet and not protein substitution per se. It is quite possible that another substance in the egg was the active ingredient or that the remission under the egg rich diet was purely incidental. Neither is the absence of hypoproteaemia especially strong evidence that this was not the problem. Unfortunately Medicine is quite a bitch in this regard.
While I am normally not someone to defend the health care system, if your doctors did order the appropriate lab tests and the tests came back negative, I do not think that they had much of a chance to catch your problem. There are just too many alternative explanations including the catchall “stuff we have no way of knowing or finding out with plausible resource allocation” which is probably the most likely hypothesis with problems like yours.
Otherwise your conclusion of “Now, I take what doctors say...” is completely on point and the most important advice you can give to educated people interacting with health care. And I am writing that as a German, so this problem is NOT confined to the US. Btw., in many cases this is not even civilizational inadequacy, but simply owed to the fact that a patient has a lot more info about his personal case and (in cases of a known illness) can easily become a much better expert for his illness that the average doctor who is expected to know something about a whole host of different problems.